The Ancient World

For most of human history the rules of architecture were not written down. They were carried in the hands and heads of builders, taught on site, and embodied in the buildings themselves. The first architectural treatise that survives, Vitruvius’s, was written around 25 BC, when the pyramids were already two and a half thousand years old. This chapter covers that long first age: the monuments of the Stone Age, the three great river and plateau civilisations of the Near East (Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia) and the Bronze Age cultures of the Aegean from which Greek architecture grew.

We know their rules the way archaeologists know them: by measuring. Where a text survives it is rarely a treatise. A mathematical handbook, the Rhind Papyrus, tells us how an Egyptian scribe specified the slope of a pyramid; a Greek traveller, Herodotus, describes Babylon and repeats what he was told about the pyramids; another, Pausanias, names the ruins of Mycenae. The rest is the evidence of the stones, and that evidence is remarkably consistent. Each of these traditions settled early on a small set of forms and proportions and kept them for centuries, and in Egypt for three thousand years.

Great stones

The oldest monumental architecture known was built by hunter-gatherers. At Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, around 9500 BC, people raised rings of T-shaped limestone pillars, several metres tall and carved with animals, long before farming or pottery. In Atlantic Europe, from the fifth millennium BC, the first farmers set up megaliths: standing stones, avenues of them, circles, and tombs of upright slabs roofed with capstones (the dolmen) or with corbelled courses, as at Newgrange and Maeshowe.

These are the simplest structures there can be, and they already contain the two basic ways of spanning space discussed in Post and Lintel: the beam laid across supports, and the corbel stepping out over a void. They also contain the idea that a building can be aligned with the heavens. The horseshoe of trilithons at Stonehenge opens along the axis of the midsummer sunrise; the passage at Newgrange admits the midwinter dawn to the chamber at its heart. A monument is fixed in the landscape and in the year at once.

℟Set the monument on the solstice axis

Orient the principal axis of the monument on the rising or setting of the sun at a solstice, so that the architecture frames it.

Egypt: building for eternity

Egyptian architecture was born of two materials that could hardly be more different. Along the Nile people built with mud brick, reeds and palm ribs, materials that are cheap, quick and perishable. For the gods and the dead they wanted permanence, and found it in the limestone and sandstone of the valley cliffs and the granite of Aswan. The genius of the tradition was to translate the forms of the perishable architecture into the permanent one: the inward slope of mud-brick walls became the batter of stone pylons; the bound reeds at the corners of shrines became the torus moulding; the bent tops of reed walls became the cavetto cornice; papyrus stems became columns.

The pyramids and the seked

The first kings were buried under mastabas, rectangular benches of brick over deep shafts. Around 2650 BC Imhotep, minister of King Djoser, built a mastaba of stone at Saqqara and then enlarged it, stage upon stage, into the Step Pyramid, the first great building in cut stone. Within a century, under King Sneferu, the steps were filled out to make a smooth, true pyramid. Sneferu’s builders did not get it right at once. At Dahshur they began a pyramid so steep that, apparently alarmed by settlement and cracking, they changed to a much gentler slope partway up, leaving the Bent Pyramid; its neighbour, the Red Pyramid, was built at the gentle slope from the start. Sneferu’s son Khufu then built the Great Pyramid at Giza, at a slope between the two.

The Rhind Papyrus, a scribe’s copy made around 1550 BC of a textbook three centuries older, shows in its Problems 56 to 60 how the slope was specified. Egyptian mathematics had no angles; it had ratios expressed in the units of the building site. The royal cubit, about 52.4 cm, was divided into seven palms of four fingers. The seked of a pyramid is the number of palms its face runs inward for every cubit it rises. A mason could set it out with a square, a plumb line and a cubit rod, and check every block of the casing against it.

℟The seked of a pyramid

Specify the slope of a pyramid face by its seked: the number of palms (and fingers) by which the face runs inward for every cubit of rise. The height follows from half the base divided by the seked, times seven.

seked = 7 × (½ base ⁄ height) palms · angle = arctan(7 ⁄ seked)

The Great Pyramid was laid out 440 cubits square and 280 cubits high: a seked of exactly 5½ palms. Its base, some 230 m on a side, is level to within a few centimetres and aligned to the cardinal points to within a small fraction of a degree. The ratio of perimeter to height comes out almost exactly 2π, which has fed much speculation; but it follows directly from choosing 5½ palms, a simple number for a builder, and needs no other explanation.

℟The Great Pyramid: 440 cubits by 280

The Great Pyramid of Khufu was laid out 440 royal cubits square and 280 cubits high, a seked of exactly 5½ palms and a slope of about 51°50′.

½ × 440 ÷ 280 × 7 = 5½ palms → arctan(7 ⁄ 5.5) ≈ 51.84°

The temple: a procession in stone

In the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC) the great building effort passed from the tombs of the kings to the houses of the gods, above all at Thebes. The temple was the god’s dwelling, where the cult image was washed, dressed and fed each day by priests, and from which it emerged on festival days in a portable boat-shrine carried in procession. Its plan follows that procession. From an avenue of sphinxes one passes between a pair of obelisks and through the pylon, a gateway of two battered towers crowned with cavetto cornices, into an open court surrounded by colonnades. Beyond is the hypostyle hall, dim and crowded with columns; beyond that a series of smaller rooms, and finally the sanctuary, where the image stood in its naos.

At each threshold the floor rises a little and the roof comes down, so that the space contracts and darkens towards the holiest place, which stands on the highest ground like the mound that first rose from the waters at the creation. The columns are the reeds and papyrus of that primeval marsh; the ceilings are painted with stars.

Because the halls were roofed entirely in stone, their columns had to be massive and close together; the hypostyle is architecture of mass and shadow. The columns themselves were plants in stone: bundles of papyrus or lotus stems tied at the neck with five bands, or single stems with a broad open umbel, or palm trunks with their fronds bound at the top. In the greatest halls the tall central columns had open capitals and the lower ones closed buds, as if the plants nearest the light had flowered. A quite different column, faceted or fluted and crowned only by a square slab, appears in the Middle Kingdom tombs at Beni Hasan: the Egyptologists of the nineteenth century called it “proto-Doric”.

Mesopotamia: the brick mountain

Between the Tigris and the Euphrates there is almost no stone and little good timber, but endless clay. The Sumerians, who built the world’s first cities there in the fourth millennium BC, made an architecture of brick: sun-dried for ordinary walls, kiln-fired and bedded in bitumen for walls that had to last. Monumental effect came from mass, from height, and from the play of light on long walls broken by buttresses and recesses.

From early times the temple was raised on a platform, and the platform grew into the ziggurat: a solid stepped tower with a shrine on its summit, a man-made mountain bringing the temple nearer to the god. The best preserved is the ziggurat of Ur, built by King Ur-Nammu around 2100 BC. Its first stage, which survives, is about 62 by 43 m and 11 m high; a core of mud brick is wrapped in a skin of baked brick some 2.5 m thick, laid in bitumen and pierced with weep holes to drain the core. Three stairways (one straight up the middle, two against the face) meet at a gate on the first terrace. The upper stages and the shrine are gone, and every model of them is a restoration.

The fame of Babylon’s walls, with their baked brick and bitumen, reached even Rome. Vitruvius, advising his reader to build walls of whatever material the place provides, notes that not every city can have a wall built of burnt brick like that at Babylon, where there was plenty of asphalt to take the place of lime and sand (I.5.8). Nebuchadnezzar II’s Babylon of the sixth century BC added walls, gates and processional ways of glazed brick in brilliant blue, with bulls and dragons in relief (among them the Ishtar Gate), and rebuilt the great ziggurat that the Bible remembers as the Tower of Babel.

Persia: the hall of a hundred columns

The Achaemenid Persians, who conquered Babylon in 539 BC and Egypt in 525, built an architecture out of the whole of their empire. Darius I records in his foundation charter at Susa that cedar came from Lebanon, gold from Sardis and Bactria, and that the stonecutters were Ionians and Sardians, the brickmakers Babylonians. At Persepolis, on a vast terrace at the foot of a mountain, Darius and Xerxes built halls whose like had never been seen: square rooms filled with a grid of stone columns, so slender and so widely spaced that they could only be roofed in timber.

The Apadana, the audience hall begun around 515 BC, is about 60 m square with thirty-six columns inside and twelve more in each of three porticoes. Its columns, roughly twelve diameters high, stand on bell-shaped bases, have fluted shafts, and end in capitals of stacked palm leaves, vertical volutes and kneeling bulls set back to back, with the great beams resting in the saddles between their necks. The hall stands on its own platform, reached by double stairs whose parapets carry reliefs of delegations from all the subject peoples bringing gifts to the king.

Cyrus the Great, founder of the empire, had himself buried at Pasargadae in a quite different building: a small stone chamber with a gabled roof, raised on six great steps: a house for the dead set on a stepped base, severe and almost Greek in its restraint.

The Aegean: palaces, citadels and beehive tombs

In the Bronze Age the islands and shores of the Aegean produced two linked cultures. On Crete, the Minoans (c. 1900–1450 BC) built palaces at Knossos, Phaistos and Malia: sprawling, many-storeyed complexes grouped round central courts, opened to light and air by light-wells, and painted with frescoes. Their columns were of wood and, unusually, tapered downward, carrying a cushion-shaped capital.

On the mainland the Mycenaeans (c. 1600–1100 BC) fortified their palaces behind walls of enormous rough blocks, which later Greeks thought the work of giants: cyclopean masonry. At the heart of each palace stood the megaron: a porch with two columns between the ends of the side walls, a vestibule, and a great hall with a round hearth ringed by four columns, the throne against one wall. Its axial plan and columned porch are the root of the Greek temple.

The Mycenaean kings were buried in tholos tombs: round chambers roofed by corbelled domes, entered through a long open passage, the dromos, and a deep doorway spanned by huge lintels, the whole buried under an earth mound. The greatest, the so-called Treasury of Atreus (c. 1250 BC), is 14.5 m across and 13.2 m high, built of thirty-three courses of cut conglomerate, each ring stepping inward over the one below and dressed to a smooth curve inside. The inner lintel of its doorway weighs about 120 tonnes; above it a relieving triangle keeps the weight of the wall off the stone. No wider span was roofed without supports for more than a thousand years.

What the ancient world handed on

By the time the Bronze Age palaces fell, around 1200 BC, almost every element of later architecture had been invented somewhere between the Nile and the Aegean: the column and the beam, the colonnade and the hypostyle hall, the clerestory, the axial plan, the platform and the monumental stair, the corbelled vault and dome, the brick arch, glazed ornament, and the idea of a building aligned on the sky. What was lacking was a theory: a way of relating all the parts of a building to one another by number, and of explaining why. That was the achievement of the Greeks, who learned the columned stone temple from Egypt, the megaron from their own Mycenaean past, and much ornament from the Near East, and turned them into the orders.